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Apple Announces New Pro Software
yroJJory writes "Apparently, Apple has just announced new pro software today. First off is the new app Motion, which is a new motion graphics program with real-time previews, procedural behavior animation and Final Cut Pro HD integration. Second, is Final Cut Pro HD, boasting the beauty of HD with the simplicity of DV. Capture DVCPRO HD over FireWire, edit using camera-native footage and output over FireWire with no generational quality loss. RT Extreme, now for HD, can deliver multiple HD streams, effects, filters and transitions in real-time to an attached Apple Cinema Display. Last, but most important to me, is DVD Studio Pro 3, which has slick new transitions, superb HD to MPEG-2 encoding, Graphical View, support for all professional audio formats -- including DTS -- (FINALLY!!), and integration with Final Cut Pro HD and Motion. Motion will be available this summer for $299. The Final Cut Pro HD update is available now for FCP 4 users. DVD Studio Pro 3 is expected to ship in mid-May." Reader green pizza writes "Apple today introduced Xsan, a clustered filesystem for Mac OS X systems."
Motion capture is completely different from motion graphics. And yes, Motion capture is too expensive to be done at the consumer level.
Not to be an ass, but this could have been cleared up by simply clicking the link in the article and reading the first sentence in the product description...
Xsan is a typical SAN filesystem, not just "network mount points". It allows storage to be pooled and aggregated, and for multiple machines to concurrently mount the same filesystem(s) simultaneously. The keys in a SAN are things like storage monitoring, management, centralization, and performance.
Just look at Apple's Xsan home page and Xsan press release.
Apple also introduced Shake 3.5 for Mac OS X, Linux, and IRIX...
Click the links first, functionality of the software is explained there. Motion capture needs points of reference on the target. Its also usually done in a high contrast environment (similar to blue/greenscreen but not as fancy) and the reference points have to be highly visible on the target (i.e. white tufts on all movement points, black suit underneath). Most ppl wouldnt want to bother with this even if they had hardware/software capable of doing it....
It's a SAN clustering program. You run Xsan on each of your 4 Xserves, you plug a 3T Xserve RAID into each of them, and the whole backend appears to your G5 (and every other G5 on the network) as a single 12T volume that's faster than any single hardware unit, since Xsan also does load balancing.
Well, they are using the DVCPRO HD codec, which requires only 100Mbps stream, 1394b is overkill.
Apple suggests that you have a 160MB(capital B)ps connection to do uncompressed (read: non DVCPRO HD) HD content, which requires a PCI-based solution, not firewire.
Technically, FCP does support uncompressed HD. It's just not for free over FireWire (it'll take a Kona capture card and a storage system of the Xserve RAID's calibre).
Xsan is Apple's port of ADIC's CVFS (or "StorNext" as they took to calling it a while back) to Mac OS X, with new administration tools.
A CVFS client on Window, Solaris, whatever, will plug right into an Xsan network.
I write in my journal
Given that in rendering you are crunching large chunks of data. The fact that G5s are 64-bit and have an insane amount of bandwidth between every subsystem probably helps it quite a bit. Not to mention that while Shake is optimized for the G5 (compiled with 64 bit support), it is doubtful that the same optimizations were given for, say, AMD64. The G5 is no slouch, as you seem to be inferring.
One thing that I am pretty sure about, but not positive, is the cost of running a linux cluster node in the farm. I know the OS X licenses for a cluster node are free. However, I do not believe that to be the case with a Linux node. Again, further driving the cost way up. The most cost effective option for recent shake adopters are most likely XServe G5 Cluster Nodes. As they are relatively cheap individually (for the power they provide) and you do not need to pay a licensing fee for each node.
They make it sound like realtime HD over firewire is some big deal until you realize it's just 19Mbps HDV video
Wrong. HD over FireWire is 100 Mbps. It's only after the program content has been sent to the transmitter that HD gets squeezed all the way down to 19 Mbps. In production, the bit rates are 50-100 times higher than that.
(Real men deal with uncompressed SMPTE-292, of course. Gigabit and a half per second, thank you very much.)
You shouldn't comment on what you don't know.
Right back atcha.
I write in my journal
Apple didn't buy a company that developed FCP, but rather bought an unfinished product called Key Grip from Macromedia. Here is a brief history of how the product came to be.
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Kathlyn and I remember when FCP was being developed on WindowsNT (at Macromedia and was known as Key Grip) and Media 100 had signed on with the Key Grip team to make it their front-end of choice for M100's soon-to-be Windows system. (It was Q3-1996 at the time.) At the Macromedia World Developers Conference in September 1996, we were guests of John Molinari (founder of Media 100) and he introduced us to Bud Colligan of Macromedia, Lauren Herr of Truevision (later Pinnacle), Peter Hoddie of the Quicktime team and many members of the Key Grip team.
Later on in October of 1996, I was asked to appear on a TV show as one of the panelists discussing digital video. The other panelists were Randy Ubillos (lead engineer of both Premiere and Key Grip (FCP)), Steve Whitney (then of M100 but later of Puffin Designs and then Pinnacle), and one of the key people from MicroNet (who then were key drive manufacturers in this marketspace).
I also quite well remember when Apple bought Key Grip and later rechristened it Final Cut Pro. I remember the chagrin it gave Avid and how that also intensified when Apple announced that they were dropping the six-slot PCI architecture of the old 9500/9600 design base.
I worked for Avid for 18 months under contract as a consultant to help reposition the marketing message of Avid after they made the ill-fated "We're going to be PC-only" at NAB and set their predominantly Mac-only user base on fire.
Apple did NOT develop FCP as an answer to Avid's announcement -- it was quite the opposite, really. Avid saw the writing on the wall and determined that they stood a better chance on the Windows-side of the aisle -- a move that would later prove a lapse in judgment and would require "a repositioning of the reposition."
Just to set the record straight,
Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net
GNUStep attempts to replicate the Mac OS X Cocoa API under Linux. You still have to recompile the code though, and a lot of multimedia stuff doesn't work.
You are wrong.
Apple did not "come up with Final Cut Pro." I worked at Macromedia when Randy Ubillos (of Premier fame) started creation of Keygrip. The product was 2 or more years in development and quite behind schedule. It was done out of the Macromedia offices near Oracle in the mid 90's. Macromedia sold this technology to Apple and the development continued to become Final Cut.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Avid dug their own grave on this one, and all Apple did was see an opportunity and fill it.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Watson was based on specs that Apple sent out to many of its developers about Shelock.
They projected well into the future what it could and couldn't do and suggested that folks could even build sherlock plugins based on this. Someone took these specs and made another software and released it before Apple released their much more refined version.
Moded +4 Insightful at the moment. Maybe these people don't know the true story. Or maybe you are the developer of Watson and pissed off Apple didn't buy you off like a few others had been paid off when they had done this isame thing in the past.
Actually, they had an existing shake-on-linux infrastructure. They were already a major Shake customer at the time that Apple bought the app.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."